Combine butter, chocolate, sugar, the water and liqueur in small saucepan. Stir over low heat until smooth. Place mixture in medium bowl; cool 10 minutes. Whisk in sifted flour and cocoa, then egg yolks. Bake about 25 minutes. Cool cakes in pans. Using 6.5cm round cutter, cut 12 rounds from each cake.

Chocolate Ganache

80ml cream

200g dark eating chocolate, chopped coarsely

Bring cream to a boil in small saucepan; remove from heat. Add chocolate; stir until smooth. Refrigerate until spreadable.

Beat butter, sugar and eggs in small bowl with electric mixer until combined. Transfer mixture to large bowl; stir in sifted flours and cocoa, in two batches. Knead dough on floured surface until smooth; divide in half, roll each portion between sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick. Cover; refrigerate 30 minutes.

January 20, 2010

I am so curious to know that someone can make macarons without almond powder. What's it like, I wonder? And so, I follow the recipe and bake them.

The recipe does not call to whip your egg whites until its peak, but just mix all the ingredients together until thicken. It is just like making royal icing for your Christmas fruit cake, unless this one is baked. Yeah, baked royal icing.

They do have feet once they are baked at a suggested oven temperature (though I have to adjust it to 130C for my oven), are as sweet as macarons are, but they tend much flatter in appearance, too crisp without any 'flesh' the original macarons will be. They do not have the moistness as the result of the combination of almond powder, sugars, and egg whites the original French macarons will have. Once you bite, you just find a sandwich of meringues rather than the softness and sweetness of macarons. I do think the use of almond powder is the real key to make a macaron as it is.

However, for some reason, they probably cost much cheaper in a country where almond powder is so poorly available. It is a clever idea, anyway, in one way.

I made two batches of these meringue macarons. One batch is plain and sandwiched with rosewater and rose petals cream Chantilly.

And the other batch is coffee meringue macarons, sandwiched with cappuccino chocolate. I found out that oval shape of macarons is quite pretty. I just spoon them with the tip of soup spoon.

Here is the recipe.

Macarons

by Yeni Ismayani

100g egg whites

400g icing sugar

2 Tbs cornflour

chocolate paste, optional

Whip all the ingredients until thicken. Divide the batter, if you use colouring or paste. Spoon into piping bag and pipe blobs on lightly greased baking trays (I stick with my good baking paper). Let rest for 10 minutes or until the blobs are flattened. Bake in a preheated oven to 170C for 10 minutes. Open the oven for 5 minutes, close again and turn the temperature down to 120C (I just use 130C from the start until all the batter is used) until cooked and dry. Remove from the oven, cool. Peel off of the trays and keep in an airtight-container. Use as required.

January 12, 2010

Banana seems to be our year-round popular fruit in the household. My children just nibble them at any time of the day, mostly in between meals. When they are keen, they can whiz bananas with plain Greek yogurt and there they would tuck in their smoothies for the afternoon.

Pity we cannot grow bananas in our South Auckland home garden, otherwise it would nice to harvest our own homegrown bananas, wouldn't it? I bet they'll taste much nicer, especially when they are made into ice cream.

I am not really an ice cream eater. I am allergic to milk products, although I am okay with soft cheeses. I can eat sorbet which mostly is fruit based, for they are not made from milk products. I make ice cream purposely to treat my children and also it is a way for them to learn how to make ice cream from scratch. Therefore, I can control the amount of sugar and the freshness of ingredients possibly used. They also can take benefits from it. I really want them to be independent in the kitchen in the time they are grown up, so they can always carry the positive attitude towards good food throughout their lives. I will be horrified to see them if they would choose to go the a takeaways or drive through outlets to seek food rather than cook it themselves. I do the best I can to introduce and involve them in the kitchen as early as possible. Truly saying is, being in the kitchen is their favourite fun tasks so far in our home-schooling projects.

This is my entry for NCC Banana Week, a one-off event for Natural Cooking Club members. This ice cream is very easy to do with children. I make chocolate chip biscuits and butterscotch sauce as a companion to the ice cream, or to sandwich the ice cream whenever they like. But they stick on ice cream cone, which I cannot make myself. They just eat the biscuits for afternoon tea, and never touch the butterscotch sauce. My beloved husband does!

Chopped bananas and put them in a blender or food processor with sugar and lemon juice. Whiz until smooth. Pour in the creams and milk. Whiz again until smooth. Pour on to a shallow freezer tin, cover and freeze for an hour, or until the ice has been formed around the edges. Put the mixture into the blender again, and whiz (or simply fork the iced edges to mingle with the softer one in the middle, mix well). Freeze for another hour, and then repeat. Freeze once more, whiz again and this time, pour it into the freezer container. Serving when required.

Preheat the oven to 170C. Grease or line baking sheets. Beat butter and sugars until pale and fluffy. Add in vanilla extract and egg, beat again until well mixed and smooth. Fold in sifted plain flour and baking powder. Mix well. Add in chocolate chips. Roll into marble sized balls, flatten it carefully. Bake for 12-15 minutes until cooked and golden brown. Makes 18-24.

Put all the ingredients in a heavy pot. Stir until butter is melted and sugar is dissolved. Let it boil, then simmer until the sauce is thicken.

To assemble:
Prepare one sheet of biscuit, scoop the ice cream on top. Drizzle with butterscotch sauce and sprinkle with chocolate hails, and top with another sheet of biscuit. Just use your imagination, I suppose. Nothing can go wrong, really :) Enjoy!

January 09, 2010

Perhaps, you may feel something soft and delicate when you start putting a bite of chiffon cake in between your palate and your tongue, beginning to melt in your curious spittle, like a drop of wet cloud heavy with rain. Perhaps, the flavour is so clear yet not too sweet, just to be right, lightly indulging your taste buds. Things that can be expected from such a cake. Like a queen, beautiful, airy, and delicate.

There is always such a satisfaction when you see the batter rises into its pinnacle, high and proud, thrusts for heaven. Yet, there is a deep condolences when it is stuck at the bottom of the pan and stays short and solid. Even when a finger touches, it does not spring back.

I don't bake a lot of chiffon cakes from the first time I started baking. Not that I do not dare, but baking a chiffon cake needs a whole concentration and a feeling for it. You cannot miss one bit of ingredients or whisk the egg whites way too dry to avoid failure. I do not want to bake a chiffon cake because I want to try to impress someone or a group of friends or even myself. But, like I said, I have to feel for it. Feel for the needs of it.

Actually, I feel the need of chocolate. Not too rich and dark, as to conquer my late afternoon divine to a sudden burst, but it is quite light that can lift my spirit up, slowly. And so I chose to bake a chocolate chiffon cake. Not too sure if it's a basic, but somehow it is an old recipe from my mother's old recipe compilation. I said it is AGED, as she had collected her favourite recipes since I was at my high school. And it was years and years ago.

Everything aging is antique, don't you think? And they usually are made to inspire us today. So, I baked this cake sometime last year, when I had that feeling. Oh yes, it rose high and proud.

The cake is originally iced with cream cheese mixed with roasted cashew nuts, but I just minimized it with only a drizzle of chocolate fudge sauce or white chocolate icing with shaved white chocolate, which makes it pure Chocolate Chiffon Cake.

First of all, you need to preheat the oven to 150C (Indonesian recipe usually does not mention this oven temperature at a first thing to do like most Western recipes do, so you need to skim the whole recipe to figure it out. Sometimes, they just state 'slow, moderate, or hot' oven, instead of mentioning the degrees).

Beat egg yolks and half of the sugar until fluffy. Add in chocolate mix. Mix well, set aside.

Fold in plain flour mixture, a little at a time, mix well.

Whisk the egg whites in a dry (and clean) bowl until foamy. Add in cream of tartar. Keep whisking while adding the remaining sugar in a little at a time, until the sugar dissolved.

Fold whisked egg whites into the flour mixture, mix well.

Pour (or spoon) the batter into a greased (with oil) 19cm chiffon cake tin. (I heard a myth about not to grease or flour chiffon cake tin, but I did both. I use rice flour to coat the greased tin--the result makes crusty layer of skin and dry, not sticky).

Bake in a preheated oven to 150C for 40 minutes to rise and cooked. Remove and cool.

Some people say to flip your chiffon tin bottom-up as soon as you removed the cake from the oven, to avoid the cake falls back. But I did not do it, and the cake stays high as you've seen on the photos.

Icing

3 egg yolks

175g caster sugar

300g cream cheese

75g unsalted butter

1 1/2 tsp vanilla powder

150g roasted cashew nuts

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water until pale and fluffy. The sugar will be 'cooked'. Remove and keep whisking until it cools down.

Beat cream cheese, butter, and vanilla until smooth.

Pour in the egg mixture into the cheese mixture, mix well.

Cut the cake in three equal layers. Spread the icing on each layer, top with another layer, and do the same to the remaining layers.

Ice the cake with the remaining icing, decorate with roasted cashew nuts.

January 03, 2010

Towards the end of 2009, I usually am busy with baking for Christmas. Although we are Muslims, we always contribute to our family's Christmas lunch. For Christmas is a get together and a family reunion, I always am looking forward to it. I miss my own family back home, so I am making the most of occasions like Christmas to be amongst the loved ones.

My job was to bake macarons my sis-in-law had ordered, and also cooked new potatoes from our garden to supply 18 hungry tummies that day. We had a BIG healthy lunch. Bread-and-alcohol-free lunch had been so filling with assorted vegetables, roast lamb and lovely seasoned roast succulent chicken. We had to have a break for a game before we filled our plates with desserts and after lunch sweets.

Then, we went down to the beach to watch the children kayaking with their uncle and daddy. After all those lovely sweets, they have to burn their calorie into positive energy, I suppose. The important thing is that they enjoyed their Christmas day.

My baking job did not stop right there, as I still have a birthday be coming up. My oldest son, Ben had asked me to bake gingerbread train for his birthday. Right, I browsed some wonderful photos over the internet and found that the one of Family Fun Gingerbread Train was the right one for Ben and Sarah's size. So, we were busily baking for a day. The children cut the templates, made the dough, the templates over the dough, and baked them. Although in the end I had to finish baking them myself, at least they knew where they had started.

Ben did not want to have a sugarpasted birthday cake because no matter how pretty it is, he and Sarah cannot eat it. I don't allow them to eat too much sugar, for their own sake. Not wanting to have children with diabetes or over weight problems, I believe I do the right thing. (They don't even eat macarons, you see. They prefer to eat sweeten rice crackers rather than chocolate fish or jelly beans). So, he knows that, and he left it up to me with a message 'not too sweet, Mum. Not good for my teeth.' Right.

Just a day before the day, I baked Strawberry Layer Cake, adapted from Mbak Ine Elkaje recipe. As we, until today, are picking our own strawberries from our garden, they were plenty to use for the cake. The night before the day, I iced it with whipped cream and cream cheese, sweetened with honey and decorated with blackberries, strawberries, chocolate, and mint leaves (which I picked just before serving). He was happy, and everyone was enjoying the cake. I was happy because the cake was so moist and spongy. Although it was kept in the fridge for overnight, it did not go hard. It was just wonderful.

We also baked chocolate biscuits which later then dipped in dark chocolate and decorated with 100s and 1000s, silver cachous, and colourful chocolate hails. I did not use much sugar in the biscuit as I knew the sprinkles will give more than the sugar they need for them. The dark chocolate was 72%, so it did not contribute much sugar as well.

And so, the gingerbread train was decorated in between after lunch tea/coffee before we went through with desserts. It was pretty hard to start with the engine first thing, so I and Sue Dalbeth had helped them to hold the pieces until the royal icing went harden. I used the very fresh egg whites when making royal icing for children. Given that we are provided with free-range farm eggs, I suppose it can guarantee that one day old eggs would supply good egg whites. Don't you think?

So, here is the final Thomas the Gingerbread Train for my birthday young man. Alessandra, to answer your question, I posted this for you. Thanks so much for your attention and concern. I am well and hopefully the baby bun is, too (for it had been a busy end of December!). Now, I can have a little rest until next baking task again for KBB #15!

Happy New Year 2010! I hope you had had a great Christmas and New Year celebrations 2009, and are ready to jump in 2010 with lots of positive energy. Keep smiling and be happy!

To start the good news early this year, we have some great quality of photos received on DMBLGIT December 2009 edition. Superb lighting, lovely composition, and heaps of potentially 'licking-the-screen' effects. You are able to view the gallery here.

I thank you the judges for your time and thank you to all of the participants whom had sent out your beautiful photos to make this event run. Thank you, Andrew for the opportunity to be a host again.

Without further ado, here are the winners!

Overall Winners

These overall winning photos achieved the highest scores from all three categories (edibility, originality, and aesthetics)